Portside

David Koch is resigning from his post on the board at the American Museum of Natural History. For 23 years, everyone’s favorite “evil-twin” brother wowed the other board members with cash. That’s basically the only reason he was on the board and in his defense, it’s frequently the reason many people are on “boards” of anything.

The Koch family has spent millions funding climate change denier groups and disinformation campaigns, and scientists around the country have called for Koch to be removed from the museum board. Well, they finally got what they wanted — the American Museum of Natural History announced Koch’s resignation this week.
David Koch’s people want you to know this had nothing to do with the recent protests—of which the Daily Kos helped organize a petition that garnered around 350,000 signatures—on Koch’s position on the board.

For example, 23 scientists came together to write a letter protesting David Koch being allowed to be near anything remotely attributed to ‘science'.

We are concerned that the integrity of these institutions is compromised by association with special interests who obfuscate climate science, fight environmental regulation, oppose clean energy legislation, and seek to ease limits on industrial pollution.

For example, David Koch is a major donor, exhibit sponsor and trustee on the Board of Directors at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and the American Museum of Natural History. David Koch’s oil and manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries is one of the greatest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Mr. Koch also funds a large network of climate-change-denying organizations, spending over $67 million since 1997 to fund groups denying climate change science.

The reach of the Koch brothers’ money into our national museums has come to light in more and more perturbing ways the past few years.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a joint program of the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University, is harboring a polluter-funded climate denier. Documents uncovered by Greenpeace reveal that Dr. Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon has taken money from the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, coal giant Southern Company, and others to produce "deliverables" that push the long-debunked claim that solar activity, not fossil fuel pollution, drives global warming.

The good news is that Koch has stood down and while this is predominantly a cosmetic victory, on some level we all know this probably sticks in David Koch’s craw—and that’s something to feel good about. Of course, eyes of newts, finches’ wings and the dreams of children are also stuck in his craw so he might not even feel it.